Well i got the Small Stakes Holdem on Kindle the other day, and am really enjoying it, a shame to admit, but while i knew the terms of pot odds and implied odds, i didnt FULLY understand it, and how to use it practically. So i have already learned a TON that can help my game, and im only a partial way through the book.

Thanks for the other ideas, i'll finish this one first then see where i think i need more help, as other books may help my mental game and keep my ind focused a bit more than just basic abc strategy books etc.

Thanks for all the tips guys

No love for Hold'em Poker for Advanced Players by mason and Sklansky? I don't recall how well it held up but it was another good book when I was getting started.

Edit: Also, if you are struggling with concepts such as pot odds, I would also suggest Theory of Poker to help ground your fundamental thinking about the game as a whole.

Small Stakes Holdem is great. It really gave me a solid understanding of the fundamentals and helped me actually start having winning sessions. I read it twice before I really knew what it was saying. I still read it a lot for reference.

Once you get the basics down and see the logic behind your decisions, you can start to adjust your play to the actual players at the table. Ed Miller's "Taking off the Training Wheels" post talks about that kind of stuff. Once you feel like you have a good handle on the stuff in SSHE, take a look at this post and try to expand your game even more.

Time has not treated this book well, and I'm not solely referring to the crappy binding of 2p2 books. It's not just that game nowadays are quite different; poker theory has moved on considerably. There's a lot of advice which today looks quite strange. The loose games and shorthanded sections are particularly lol-worthy (open-fold 98s on the button, yeah right Mason). The book was written in the days before Pokerstove and the more mathematical approach to poker.

IMHO if you read SSH, play some poker and participate in these forums, you can safely ignore HEPFAP. King Yao's book "Weighing the odds" is a good introduction to using EV calcs to solve poker problems.

Bump to pay hommage to DougL's 5k thread. Op, you may not be ready for it, but it's a must read imo. It's in the library(I'm old and don't know how to post a link.)

There be monsters.

The internetz is a crazy series of tubes, some of which lead to DougL's post. Like this one here.

great thanks, ill take a look through that, im coming to an end of Small Stakes Holdem, and its helped a lot, gotta go back on some bits to fully understand, but im actually starting to make a lot more positive decisions, ye sometimes i lose money but i know long run they are the better decisions to be making.

As for DougL's post, for sure, i have read some of his reposnses in other topics, and dang he knows his stuff